"Teaching would be a great job if it wasn't for those students..." ;-)
It is common that when you begin student teaching, your students will seem engaged at first and then their enthusiasm may seem to wain. Why is this? Welcome to teaching. Good teachers think about the reasons for how their students respond to their teaching in particular ways and what they as teachers can do to engage their students. We can use this page as a organize (and re-organize) our thinking about how best to engage and motivate our students.
Notice that this page has several different ways that you can interact and add to its content. This is not an accident. Motivating students is some of the "bread and butter" of teaching, and teachers often criticize strategies suggested by scholars and researchers outside of school as too "theoretical" or impractical. Hopefully, this page will serve as a place that over we can collect and examine the strategies we learn about in our classes at URI, what others are doing on the web, and what we see working (or not) in our own classrooms.
Motivation Mind Map
Brainstorm: What Motivation/Engagement Issues Are We Seeing in Our Classrooms?
An obvious resource for reviewing motivation is your Educational Psychology book. What seemed abstract to you in 312 is now important as you try to avoid your students becoming glassy-eyed zombies. This is a supplemental webpage for Ormod's Educational Psychology that has links to several motivation summaries.
Mike Muir is a former Middle School Educator of the Year in Maine, and now directs the Center for Engaged and Meaningful Learning at the University of Maine. He maintains a wikispace of motivation resources.
Edutopia.org occasionally solicits "sage advice." This page collects advice on motivating "gifted" students.
One way to motivate and engage students is to provide them with learning opportunities within a context of them solving an authentic problem or answering a question. Often called Project-Based Learning, this article describes the steps in planning an PBL project:
. This video describing a Rube Goldberg competition held at the college level has a student explaining how such an activity can take over one's life:
The Source of Motivation is an entry on motivation from the So You Want to Teach blog entry from Joel, a new (music) teacher in Texas. Joel describes his first two years of teaching as horrible, and his blog chronicles his quest of teaching excellence. Here is another of Joel's entries about Six Steps to Motivating Students. Joel has several blog entries about motivation.
It is common that when you begin student teaching, your students will seem engaged at first and then their enthusiasm may seem to wain. Why is this? Welcome to teaching. Good teachers think about the reasons for how their students respond to their teaching in particular ways and what they as teachers can do to engage their students. We can use this page as a organize (and re-organize) our thinking about how best to engage and motivate our students.
Notice that this page has several different ways that you can interact and add to its content. This is not an accident. Motivating students is some of the "bread and butter" of teaching, and teachers often criticize strategies suggested by scholars and researchers outside of school as too "theoretical" or impractical. Hopefully, this page will serve as a place that over we can collect and examine the strategies we learn about in our classes at URI, what others are doing on the web, and what we see working (or not) in our own classrooms.
Motivation Mind Map
Brainstorm: What Motivation/Engagement Issues Are We Seeing in Our Classrooms?
A Compact Summary of Motivation Theory
http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/motivation/motivate.htmlCT Motivation Strategies:
Motivation References